Fold It: The Protein Folding Game

It features a new approach to protein prediction. Instead of using a more or less brute-force approach, with a CPU trying lots and lots of possibilities and calculating which ones give the best results, the game uses the human brain’s pattern recognition abilities (with help from a few automated tools) to try to find the lowest-energy folded state of a protein.

It has the potential to be on the cutting edge of a new generation of scientific games that are fun to play, teach you things, and can actually help researchers.

Words are inadequate to describe it, so please watch the two videos below to get an idea.

And don’t worry about it being too hard; the game starts very slowly, with step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use all the tools and the interface. It’s really well-done and intuitive, especially for a beta.

What about having high school kids do this as part of their curriculum? They could have challenges with other schools or between classes in the same school. I suppose some prize other than a good grade would add incentive.

In short: the human body uses about 100,000 proteins (encoded in about 20,000 genes, iirc). Proteins are the building blocks of life. Pretty much everything biological is done with them.

Protein function is determined by its 3D shape. The better we get at predicting protein 3D shapes from amino acid sequences, the better we get at predicting function from 3D shape, and the better we get at designing proteins from scratch, the easier it will be for us to understand how metabolism works and to find cures for diseases.

There was a software program some years ago called Sculpt. The start-up that wrote it eventually was bought out by Acelrys and I believe sculpt is now a function in their software somewhere. Glad to see it here though — think this is a much more iteresting way of using the interactivity.

>And if some discovery went to win a Nobel prize, they would be >named as co-recipients.
>
>Not 100% sure about the Nobel part, but that certainly would be a
>nice incentive :)

If you mean “named as co-recipients” literally, I’m 100% sure that it’s *not* the case, as the Nobel rules are quite explicit that a given prize can be split at most three ways, and if there are more than three contributors, it sure ain’t the “head honchos” who get left out.

“Named in the Nobel citation” is barely possible, but still highly unlikely, as there are a lot of people ahead of you in line for that too, unless you really did something that no “formal” (i.e. academic, government, or corporate) member of the “team” thought of.

And even “names included in any scientific papers published” most likely means an acknowledgment, not a co-authorship. (Again, barring something truly original that’s genuinely your contribution and yours alone.) Which is nice I suppose, but add four bucks and it’ll get you a gallon of gas (this week, in relatively “cheap” places).

To clarify; if you do find something new and amazing while playing the game, the Bakerlab will cite you in its scientific papers. If you happen to earn the Nobel Prize, and if you were working alone, I am sure you would be credited. If you are working in a team however, they would probably just say the team’s name, as they could not say everyone on the team.